If you were planning to vote Republican before the Foley scandal hit, I’d have suggested that you’re seriously misguided. But if you changed your mind on the basis of the Foley scandal, you’re even more misguided. There is a vast gulf separating the Democrats and the Republicans over public policy matters that affect hundreds of millions of people. Voting on the basis of how they handle a few teenagers is just silly. ~Jonathan Chait, The Los Angeles Times

Via Ross Douthat

Chait here offers another example of the fine TNR style of counterintuitive bucking of conventional wisdom.  If a scandal breaks out that promises to throw the GOP from power, get Chait on the case to argue for why people who are turning against the GOP are silly.  And Democrats wonder why they have had a hard time winning. 

Ross makes the argument for why it is rather less than silly to abandon the GOP over the Foley scandal.  I agree with that argument, and I would take it a little further.  Not only is the collapse of GOP support among “religious whites” not silly, it is entirely understandable and natural in a democratic election.  Platforms and policies do not enter into it, as they almost never do for the bulk of voters.  Political coalitions in this country are not built around unifying Big Ideas, at least not anymore, nor even around the positive appeal of this or that policy.  The coalitions are focused on a number of specific proposals, none of which can be too bizarre or ridiculous to significantly alienate a large bloc of potential voters.  Voters approve of a coalition because it contains fewer objectionable items on its agenda and fewer provocative or offensive symbols.  This is why the mushy politics of the center keeps prevailing, because the margin of victory typically keeps coming from those people whose attraction to one party or another is not motivated by that party’s positive appeal but by the obnoxious things it doesn’t say.  Right now, the appeal of the Democrats is that they don’t say obnoxious things such as “stay the course” and “we knew about Foley’s problems before we didn’t know about them, but don’t blame us.”  Very few people voted for Bush in 2004 to privatise Social Security; quite a lot of people who were out in force to ban gay “marriage” voted for Bush because they recognised in him someone who made the occasional rhetorical gesture towards the integrity of marriage and saw him as a defender of a basic social institution.  He was “one of them” on what they deemed a vital issue.  They identified with him, not even necessarily with his policies, because he had done virtually nothing to help any of the state bans on gay “marriage” and virtually actively avoided being associated with the efforts to promote the bans. 

In mass democracy, as I have mentioned a few times before, people vote for the candidates and party that they believe represents them, by which I mean the candidates and party with which they identify on a personal level.  Incidentally, this is one of the “identitarian” and leftist features of democracy that makes it still more undesirable from my perspective.  It is, in its way, profoundly non-rational (not exactly irrational, since voting in people like you makes a certain amount of sense if you expect solidarity to be rewarded with spoils from the victors). 

If you are unable to see the people running for office as people who are, in the main, basically like you, you will be hard-pressed to vote for them.  This, more than anything else, is why incendiary cultural issues centered on marriage, family and the unborn motivate such unrelenting contempt for the left among so many Christians: it is almost impossible for these Christian folks to actually imagine what other people who would approve of gay “marriage” or partial-birth abortion are like, much less actively identify with them.  Such people are strange and alien to them; they might as well be from another world or speaking a different, untranslatable language. 

It is a question of holding the same “values,” yes, but in a sense the more important aspect of this process of identification is being able to recognise yourself in the people for whom you are voting.  This is also why the great hunt for minority Republican voters will be an eternal, disappointing chase: these voters may have very conservative values in many cases, but they simply don’t see themselves in the GOP (and on this point, I can’t really blame them, since I don’t even see myself in the GOP, and by all factors of race, social background, religious practice and education I ought to be one of their most reliable members).  To be more blunt, voters who vote based on competence and policy positions would not re-elect someone like Ray Nagin in New Orleans; voters who vote based on identification with the politician would.      

For many Christians and conservatives, the GOP is still that party that represents them, but evidently for quite a few regular church-goers they no longer recognise themselves in the leadership of that party.  The Foley scandal is not silly for these people, but the final straw that demonstrates once and for all that the GOP leaders aren’t “their kind of people,” the kind of people who would intuitively and instinctively know that something was fishy with Foley.  When voters do not see themselves reflected back in this political mirror, they shrink back from the image they do see.  Most people vote based on symbolism and sentiment.  I would have thought that after the last 15 years where competence and policy have had virtually no place in determining the outcome of elections we would recognise that it is what people believe the victory of this or that party means symbolically that determines their voting.  Vacuous as they were, I suspect Clinton’s rhetorical appeals to “a place called Hope” and “building a bridge to the twenty-first century” registered more with voters than anything to do with welfare reform.  Yes, there are wonkish people who actually vote based on foreign policy paradigms, and there are people who vote their straight economic interest, but I submit to you that these do not make up a very large number of people.  Pundits will rattle off all the alleged differences between the parties on policy and try to convince people just how vast and deep the chasms between the two parties are, but that isn’t what interests voters (even if there were vast and deep differences, of which even now there are only a very few).  The questions they ask are much more basic and, from the perspective of wonks and political junkies, much sillier: is this person familiar, do I identify with him, is he “my kind of guy”?  A lot of people look at Denny Hastert now and think, “Good grief, I hope he isn’t my kind of guy–what would that say about me?”  The identification process works in both directions.  Politicians have to be people voters can identify with, but they also have to be people with whom voters would not be ashamed to be associated.  What does any of this have to do with shaping important policy and deciding the course of nations?  Absolutely nothing.  Yet another reason why I have no confidence in democracy to provide good government or good order.  But at the very least the voters are not being silly.  They are just being democrats.